Delicious Library 2 – A Media Addict’s Methadone

It‚Äôs been two minutes since I have downloaded a video from YouTube to my laptop. Should we really have wireless here in the meeting hall? I have CDs, DVDs, VCDs, MOVs, AVIs, DIVX, MP3s, hard copy books, e-books, audiobooks an iTunes library and god help me a few VHS cassettes.

Is this you?

Think about it. In the internet age with terabyte hard drives under $400 dollars and cheap burnable media. Your closer to this than you might think. A few years ago I had this realization and started looking around for a way to catalog all my media. I‚Äôve built filemaker pro databases and used cd finder. I‚Äôve found pluses and minuses to them all. But overall the one I have used and stuck with for it‚Äôs ease of use is Delicious Library from Delicious Monster. Yesterday Delicious Monster released a 2.0 beta of their new Delicious Library 2.0.

This is a beta. It out performs and has a larger, richer feature set than everything else I have tried.

Why use it?

1. Bar Code scanning with your built in camera

Delicious Library uses your macs built in camera to scan your barcode and query a database on the internet to retrieve your media‚Äôs description info and a picture or cover art from Amazon. If your are really Type A and have the means. Delicious Monster also offers a wireless barcode scanner for purchase.

2. Use the shelf metaphor to visually organize and display your media.

Like shelves in a library, video or music store. Delicious Library displays your media with covers.

All of the media in iTunes becomes part of your Delicious Monster instantly.

4. Web Publishing

Publish your library to .Mac or import your FTP preferences from Transmit and use that. Also you can publish directly into your iWeb site. Pre-made templates are available in the application. Publish some or all of your library, hiding private items with a special flag. They have also added iPhone and iPod Touch compliant Web Publishing. So both the iPhone and iPod Touch will render your library pages correctly.

5. Smart Shelves

Like smart lists in iTunes define special shelves based on your needs.

6. Media Types

It seems that if it’s on Amazon you can store it in delicious library.

Books

Movies

Albums

Software

Video games

Toys

Gadgets

Tools

Apparel

Problems while using:

Delicious Library doesn‚Äôt seem to have a way to catalog shareware I.E. Software that isn’t shrink wrapped. It can‚Äôt catalog itself. I would think that this could be achieved by using a service similar to iusethis.com

Delicious Library 2 from Delicious Monster is available on their website for $40.00 or upgrade from Delicious Library 1 for $20.00